When an AIs faction/class is set to random in the lobby screen, it will not be able to pick any of the banned factions. This does not affect players who randomise their faction, nor does it hide factions from manual selection for players or AI.

Installation

Extract the zip file wherever you want.
Copy or move the folder for the factions you want to ban into your mods folder
1. C:\Users\YourUsername\AppData\Roaming\coe5\mods
2. If it doesn’t exist, create it. Make sure hidden files are visible.
Start the game and enable the mods in the modding menu.

Compatibility:

This should work with custom factions. I tested it with my in development mindflayer faction.Read below.
Beware that trying to ban a faction from a mod that isn’t currently enabled and active, will cause the modloader to fail and kick you to the desktop.

Known Issues:

With “Unique random players” enabled, if there are fewer available factions, than AI set to random, the game will likely crash (around 5/6 times during testing). This seems to be an engine bug, likely the devs never anticipated such a scenario and thus did’t create a saftey check for it.
It is cumbersome to manage many different factions. But the modding tools provide no way for me to create convenient in game options. so we are stuck enabling each faction one at a time seperately, or editing the mod files.

Adding custom factions to the bannable list:

I have not extensively tested this or figured out a reliable way to get modded a factions ID. But it worked for my in development mindflayer mod, by assuming it was index 500. I have no idea why that worked.

Navigate to the mod folder
1. if installed manually from this site, this is the mods folder mention int he installation
2. The steam version is at: Steam/steamapps/workshop/content/1606340/3802526523/
Open the .c5m file in a local text editor like notepad or visual studio code (not in a cloud editor like google docs or onedrive, they will mess with the formatting)
Add the following lines anywhere under the description line:
1. selectclass ClassIndexNumber
2. aiclass -1
You can also start a line with # to write a comment to remind yourself what class the entry is for.

Conquest of Elysium 5

Ban Factions in Conquest of Elysium